The present invention relates to a communications network, and in particular to charging mechanisms in such a network. It includes aspects of the inventions disclosed and claimed in the present applicant's co-pending British patent application no. 9812161.9 filed 5 Jun. 1998 (applicant's ref: A25547) and the contents of that earlier application are incorporated herein by reference.
In conventional communications networks, such as national PSTNs (public switched telephone networks), a significant proportion of the network resources are devoted to metering and billing network usage. Studies have estimated these resources as consuming as much as 6% of the revenue of a telecommunications company. The Internet, by contrast, does not in general incorporate metering and billing mechanisms for individual customers. The absence of the network infrastructure required to support metering and billing reduces the operational costs of the Internet compared to conventional telephony networks, and has facilitated the rapid expansion of the Internet. However, the absence of appropriate billing mechanisms has significant disadvantages in terms of the characteristics of the traffic carried by the Internet: it encourages profligate use of network resources, and diminishes the incentive for investment in network infrastructure to support new applications requiring, e.g., guaranteed quality of service (QoS).